I recently had a discussion about ACs and how they heat up cities.
Then I found an article about theoretical increase of efficiency of acs by using the heat pulled from a room to run a thermoelectric device and getting some of the energy back that was used in the ac.
I‘ve had this downstream thought many times already: since hot air is basically just energy stored. Could we theoretically pull (all?) the energy from the air (depending on desired temp) to cool it and casually fuel our society’s energy needs?
@Haui but, that’s tricky, because the voltage and generated power may be quite unpredictable, and generally power network and devices do **NOT** like that. Which requires additional devices to make that power predictable, which costs resources and generates heat…